


Delirium

by pushingcrazies



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-05-09
Packaged: 2018-01-24 03:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1590725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushingcrazies/pseuds/pushingcrazies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during “Observer Effect” - Any code can be broken.  Even the ones you don’t realise are coded in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Delirium

My head hurts so bad it’s vibrating.  My eyes are gummy and gross.  Every movement I make sends shivers racing through my body, making my head ache worse until I want to vomit.  Again.  Across from me, Trip looks like he’s not faring much better, though he’s trying to hold himself together.  I appreciate his effort - I think if he weren’t here with me, keeping up the conversation, I’d have burst into tears way before now.

 

He’s stopped talking now.  Did he ask me a question?  Is he waiting for a response?  I think so but I have no idea what he said.  I try to ask him to repeat the question but now he looks alarmed.  Don’t panic, I tell him but maybe that’s just in my head.  If I were a Vulcan I could tell him without telling him that I’m alright.  Just a bit headachy.  A bit nauseous.  Nauseated.  Gyfoglyd - that’s Welsh.  Misselijk: Dutch.  Nauseabundo is Spanish but that’s too close to English - too easy.  Thinking about languages reduces the queasiness somewhat but the look on Trip’s face is growing more and more alarmed.

 

“I think I just need some sleep,” I manage to whisper and this time I think the words actually pass over my lips because there is a deep scratchiness in my throat and my lips crack and bleed they are so dry.  Trip looks a little less frightened now that I’m responsive but there is still concern in his eyes.

 

“You should drink some water,” he says.

 

“Okay,” I agree, shutting my eyes.

 

“Now, Hoshi,” he says.  My eyes flutter open just enough to take in a brief glimpse of him getting up to fill a cup with water.  “Don’t make me make it an order.”

 

I sit up and there go the chills again, shaking my head until I think I’m going to pass out from the pain.  Maybe I do for a moment because now Trip is sitting beside me, arms wrapped around me to hold me up.  Where is the water?  He’s murmuring something in my ear but I don’t understand what is he saying he’s making my headache worse.  All I need is a little sleep.  Here just a bit just a bit atta girl that’s my Hoshi he’s pouring tiny amounts of water into my mouth giving me just enough time to swallow before pouring in a little more.  Cough cough oh gods I want to scream that hurt.  

 

The water clears my head a little, cleans the layer of dust right off my brain.  My eyes focus and I can motion for Trip to let me go a little; he’s holding me so tight that I can barely move.

 

“It’s not fair,” I mumble, words slurring together into something unrecognisable, more “snotfur” than anything.  “How come you don’t feel as shitty as I do?”

 

He laughs - he actually laughs!  Well, more of a chuckle.  I don’t think he’s ever heard me swear before.  I try to be more or less professional with my superiors, even ones so laid back as Trip.  Okay maybe sometimes I swear in other languages, but they can’t prove that since no one else on the ship speaks any alien languages except T’Pol.  And okay so maybe that one time I did swear in Vulcan but she never ratted me out so I guess she just thought I was being an irrational Human.  “Believe me I feel plenty shitty,” Trip says.  His chest hums as he speaks and I can feel it through the layers of blankets separating us but it doesn’t hurt like the shivers do - it feels comforting and like childhood.  When I was sick and my Otosan would hold me and sing to me until I fell asleep.  I was never a particularly sickly child so it didn’t happen, often but sometimes when I felt like Otosan was paying more attention to my sisters than to me, I would wish I would get sick so he would hold me like that again.

 

Trip lets me go and I make a pathetic sound but maybe I didn’t or maybe he’s ignoring it because he moves back to his own bed and he’s saying something but I’m floating again, drifting on a turbulent ocean.  T’Pol taught me that.  No she told me that I _am_ a turbulent ocean.  No that’s not right she said to imagine that I am a turbulent ocean.  Something about the ocean and its chaotic nature.  I am chaos to her, but a different sort of chaos than Trip or Captain Archer.  A controllable chaos.  I have potential, she tells me.  Potential for what, though, I want to ask.  I’m a little afraid of the answer.

 

Sometimes when I’m on the bridge I feel like someone is staring at me, like a pair of eyes are boring into the back of my head but when I glance back it’s just T’Pol staring at her computer screen or into her microscope or looking at the Captain.  But I feel her eyes on me nonetheless.  In the mess hall when there are a dozen empty tables but she sits next to me.  On first contact missions when I should be either way down at the end of the table or right next to the captain depending on whether or not my translation skills are required, she is there beside me positioning herself so that I am right at her elbow while she is at Archer’s.  She gives me preferential treatment, which, from a Vulcan….isn’t exactly a compliment.  It means harsher criticism and unfair expectations.  But better rewards when I do meet her expectations.  Like the time I-

 

“...helping Phlox try to find a cure for us,” Trip says.  “Don’t you worry, they’re gonna do it.  If anyone can find a way to beat this thing, it’s them.”

 

“What?”

 

Trip frowns at me.  “You asked about T’Pol.  Least, I think that’s what you were sayin’.  Said her name, anyways.”  The sicker he gets, the thicker his accent.  

 

I asked about T’Pol?

 

Trip must be worse off than I thought if he thinks I said something out loud.

 

Something happened between the two of them.  I don’t know what.  Travis thinks they had sex.

 

Part of me hopes he’s wrong.

 

Part of me refuses to acknowledge that hope.

 

She told me once that any code can be broken.  She was talking about mathematical codes, computer codes, binary and musical codes, but she didn’t realise or maybe she didn’t know how many different kinds of code exist in the universe.  Like dogs.  Dogs have a code in their language that only they can hear.  Not many people know this.  They did an experiment once a long long time ago where they recorded two dogs growling.  One was growling because of an intruder, one because someone was trying to take the bone it was chewing on.  Then they gave a different dog a bone and played the recording of the intruder-growling dog.  The dog with the bone kept chewing on it all happy.  Then they played the recording of the bone-growling dog and the dog they were experimenting on immediately backed away from the bone because something in the growling dog’s tone, something humans and computers couldn’t differentiate, said “this is my bone - drop it before I hurt you.”

 

There was another experiment done about sixty years before that, trying to figure out how long it would take to domesticate an animal.  They used silver foxes for that one.  Turns out?  Didn’t take that long.  A couple of generations.

 

We’ve progressed even further since then.

 

I-

 

Wait…

 

I forget what my point was.

 

T’Pol.  Something about her and Trip?  They talk in codes sometimes.  Codes, that’s what it was.  I figured out her code, or at least I think I have.  Vulcan codes.  When they say “Vulcans don’t lie” what they mean is “Vulcans don’t tell the whole truth” and when they say “you have potential” what they mean is…

  
Well it means something.

 

Okay I haven’t broken the code completely.

 

If she were here right now instead of Trip I would tell her...something.  I would say “I know what you’re really saying when you tell me you hold me to a higher standard because I am capable of achieving it.”  But that’s not true at all.  She would see right through the lie.  I would say it’s unfair of her to treat me differently just because I’m more capable.  Isn’t it?  It’s not that I don’t like to be challenged - it’s just no one has ever been able to challenge me like she can.  She puts the bar way above my head and expects me to jump up to reach it.  Archer, he’s more likely to set the bar just barely out of reach.  Same with all my teachers at the Academy.  The would push me but never too hard.  Always keeping the bar within reach.

 

There’s a difference between setting reasonable goals and setting me up for failure.

 

“Illogical.”

 

She’s here.  Standing in Decon like she belongs here.  No EV suit, no protection against the virus at all.  No tray bearing a cure either.

 

“What’re you doing here?” I manage to mumble.  Across from me Trip makes a sound that must be confusion, must be worry, must be wondering why she would endanger herself like this.  Could she be immune to the virus are we past the point of contagion no time to worry about that now _sheishere_.

 

“You are being illogical,” she says like that explains everything.  She steps closer and I get a whiff of that scent that ohsoveryher smell of Vulcan deserts and icy personality.  “I would never set you up for failure.”

 

Everything I would say to her evaporates on my tongue and I realise my throat is dry again but I don’t want to ask Trip for more water.  If he touches me she might get offended and leave.  “I can’t reach the bar,” I tell her.  Tears in my eyes, using up my last ounce moisture.

 

“Hoshi-” Trip begins but she is turning around going leaving leaving me behind and nonono I will not be left behind, not this time not when it really matters.  I blink and she is gone.  I stumble to my feet nonono reach the door nonono punch the code.  I only need five minutes.  The code.  Just another language I have to reach her I have to tell her -

 

He is saying something again telling me I can’t do it well I can because she taught me, she told me and Vulcans don’t lie they only stretch the truth.  I say the words, a paraphrase of what she told me three years ago, magic words of a sort - Open Sesame.

 

“Math is just another language.”

 

And I’m free and struggling through lights disappearing and swimming blackness - are we under attack?  No, no time to worry about that I have to find her before -

 

Before -

 

Another door another godsforsaken door standing in my way but it will open just like the last one did.  Patience.  I am not a turbulent ocean, I am not chaos.  I ride it like a ship on a steady course, plowing unendingly forward.  Trip is here he’s behind me trying to stop me.  Trying to stand between me and T’Pol trying to grab me I don’t want to break his arm but I will if he tries to keep me from what I have to do.  But then he’s pulling me to his chest and I can hear his heart again ba-dump ba-dump against my ear Otosan I have to tell her but I say them I don’t want him to know I mean her.  I have to tell them while there’s still time -

 

I have to tell her I will reach that bar.

 

 


End file.
